“Superposing philosophical treatise / action thriller / site-specific work, surface will be read as symptom, and the investigator as already implicated in the contingencies of the plot, as new perspectives are opened up on the perennial philosophical question of how local and contingent phenomena focalize and express the universal – with the latter understood not as universal ratio or Hegelian Geist, but as the ‘universal history of material contingency’ invoked in Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
What is called for is a combination of CSI: Earth (examining the terrestrial crime scene and making objects speak) and a Bourne Identity-style quest (a search for identities lost in an ever-deepening web of cosmic conspiracy): A new mode of investigation that combines Freud and Ferenczi’s model of trauma and an abstraction of the ‘time-travelling’ and narrative methods of psychoanalysis, with a reading of earth sciences and natural sciences as resources for a ‘cryptography of the earth’ inspired by but surpassing Nietzsche’s ‘genealogy’ and Deleuze/Guattari’s ‘geophilosophy’.
Finding the thread or plot that leads from symptom to trauma, from crime scene to conspiracy, calls for a method that combines a formalisation of the trauma model both on local and global levels and a depth-tracking of the complicities involved (using mathematical category theory, sheaf theory and topos theory) with a multidisciplinary synthesis of modern sciences and philosophy. This new method enables us to formally define rigorous modes of navigation between global and local, and to elaborate criteria for distinguishing trivial from non-trivial plotlines (the good ‘lead’ from the bad).
The superficially commonplace crime scene is continually reframed by the navigation through ramified spaces of trauma, changing its aspect kaleidoscopically as the narrative brings into focus the different material distributions to which it belongs. With this twisted return of the ordinary (the simplicity of everyday life revealed as an encapsulated ramified path structure), theory attains an immanence with fictional affect, in the purportedly ineffable depth of metaphysical horror: As the protagonist repeatedly asks himself ‘where am I? Where did I come from? On what path am I moving?’, he finds himself set upon yet other paths, faced with broader landscapes of navigation, in too deep, unable to extricate himself from plots that reach far beyond the terrestrial sphere.”